May 6 (Bloomberg) -- Arthur Laurents, the New York-born
laureate storyteller who penned the scripts for “West Side
Story” and “Gypsy,” two of the most successful and
influential musicals in theater history, has died. He was 93.

Laurents died from complications of pneumonia, the New York
Times said, citing Scott Rudin, a producer of the most recent
Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” He lived in Manhattan’s Greenwich
Village and in Quogue, Long Island.

In a wide-ranging show-business career that spanned seven
decades, Laurents collaborated with the giants of Hollywood and
Broadway, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Elia
Kazan, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim. He
wrote the novel and screenplay for “The Way We Were” (1973)
and the screenplays for “Anastasia” (1956) and “The Turning
Point” (1977). His other musicals included “Anyone Can
Whistle” and “Do I Hear a Waltz?”

His plays included “The Time of the Cuckoo,” which was
turned into the movie “Summertime” starring Katharine Hepburn.
He staged the Broadway premiere of the musical adaptation of
“La Cage aux Folles” and three hit revivals of “Gypsy.”

Along with his productions, Laurents was known for a
volatile personality and a blunt outspokenness that made him one
of Broadway’s most colorful figures and cost him friendships
with many collaborators.

“West Side Story” reimagined the feuding clans of William
Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as two gangs on the streets
of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the
Caucasian Jets.

Economy of Words

The show, which debuted in 1957, was innovative for its
focus on music and dance, which required an economy of language
in the book by Laurents. It was he who suggested that Bernstein
focus entirely on the music and bring in Sondheim for the lyrics.
Robbins, who came up with the original idea for the show,
directed and choreographed.

Laurents wrote in “Mainly on Directing,” his 2009 memoir,
that “West Side Story” proved that “any subject -- murder,
attempted rape, bigotry -- could be the subject of a popular
musical.” After 732 performances on Broadway, it was turned
into a film in 1961. Laurents directed a revival in London in
1998.

In 2006, at 88, Laurents took up the challenge of revising
his own masterpiece. In his revival, which opened on Broadway in
March 2009, the Sharks spoke and sang in Spanish, raising the
tension between the gangs.

“Next to the original production, this one, over half a
century later, will prove by far the best revival any of us will
get in our lifetime,” John Simon wrote in his review for
Bloomberg News.

Combustible Duo

Laurents said he and Robbins, one of Broadway’s most
combustible yet successful duos, began “West Side Story” as
best friends and finished barely on speaking terms. Still,
Robbins, as director, reached out to Laurents to write the book
for “Gypsy.” It opened in 1959 with Ethel Merman in the lead
role as the strong-willed stage mother of the striptease dancer
Gypsy Rose Lee.

The production ran 702 performances and became a 1962 movie.
Of its four Broadway revivals, Laurents staged three, with
Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone starring.

“‘Gypsy’ grew to be a classic,” Laurents said in a 1990
interview with the New York Times. “It wasn’t one of those
things that was hailed as such in the beginning.”

Laurents was born Arthur Levine on July 14, 1917, in New
York. His father, Irving, was a lawyer. His mother, Ada, was a
teacher who became a full-time homemaker to raise Laurents and
his younger sister, Edith.

His parents raised him to be “intolerant of anything I
considered bigotry,” Laurents wrote in “Original Story By,”
his 2001 memoir. His own Jewish education ended with his bar
mitzvah, after which he turned against organized religion.

Brooklyn to Manhattan

Growing up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, he attended
plays at a nearby stock theater, then Broadway plays and opera
in Manhattan.

Laurents graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, in 1937. He began writing for radio, selling his first
play, “Now Playing Tomorrow,” to CBS.

“From being limited to one of the six senses -- hearing --
I learned how to establish character through words and how to
propel action through dialogue,” he later wrote.

Drafted by the U.S. Army, Laurents spent World War II on
the home front, writing scripts for the Office of War
Information.

In 1944, he wrote his first play, “Home of the Brave,”
about a Jewish soldier traumatized by his experience in a South
Pacific jungle. It opened on Broadway in 1945 and was turned
into a film in 1949. His second Broadway play was “The Bird
Cage” (1950).

Laurents moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, working on “The Snake Pit” and Alfred
Hitchcock’s “Rope.”

Blacklisted by Studios

He moved to Europe for a time during the McCarthy era,
learning later he had been blacklisted by Hollywood studios. The
U.S. State Department temporarily revoked his passport for
allegedly subversive activities.

Back in the U.S., he had his first Broadway hit with “The
Time of the Cuckoo” (1952-1953).

The idea for “West Side Story” began with Robbins. In
1949, he asked Laurents to draft a script, and Leonard Bernstein
the music, for a story of conflict between Jews and Italian
Catholics on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It took five years,
and a rethinking of Manhattan demographics and geography, for
the project to gel.

After the success of “West Side Story,” Laurents said he
turned down three requests to write the book for “Gypsy,”
which was based loosely on Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1957 memoir.

Mythic Mother

He came around, he later wrote, when he realized that the
musical didn’t have to be about a striptease queen but about her
mother -- “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerizing
mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose.”

In his directing debut, in “I Can Get It for You
Wholesale” (1962), Laurents cast a little-known 19-year-old,
Barbra Streisand, launching her career.

His “Hallelujah, Baby!” about a talented black woman
(played by Leslie Uggams) facing racial obstacles on the road to
stardom, won the 1968 Tony Award for best musical.

“The Way We Were,” Laurents’s first original movie script,
was based on his experience in Hollywood during the McCarthy era.
Streisand and Robert Redford played college sweethearts whose
marriage is undermined by their religious and political
differences.

Clash With Pollack

To Laurents, Streisand’s portrayal of a Jewish communist
was the movie’s center. The director, Sydney Pollack, insisted
on equal footing for Redford, and he and Laurents clashed
throughout the filming. Laurents returned to the topic of
Hollywood blacklisting with “Jolson Sings Again,” a play
introduced by the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1995.

Laurents also drew upon his homosexuality for some of his
best-known works. (His partner of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, died in
2006.) He included a relationship between two men, a dancer and
his company’s ballet master, in “The Turning Point,” only to
see it all but deleted by the director, Herbert Ross. The movie
was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Laurents for best
screenplay, winning none.

Directing “La Cage aux Folles” on Broadway was “one of
the happiest times I’ve had in the theater,” he told Playbill
in 2008. The show, about a gay couple who meet their son’s in-laws-to-be, ran 1,761 performances from 1983 through 1987 and
won Laurents a Tony for direction.